[Tig] Impressions with Apple OS X Leopard?

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Mon, 29 Oct 2007, Rob Lingelbach wrote:

> On Oct 29, 2007, at 8:50 PM, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
>
>> Is anyone else as annoyed by the OS X Leopard release as I am?
>
> Is it fully backward-compatible Bob-  in that apps written for prior releases 
> of OS X have no problems on Leopard?

Clearly it is not fully backward-compatible.  Lots of apps fail on it, 
including Adobe Photoshop CS2.  The situation is so bad that the Adobe 
software updater crashes and Adobe's web site says that they have no 
plans to offer any fixes for it.  Adobe Photoshop CS3 is closer but 
Adobe's sheet lists lots of problem areas and say that they will 
address them over the next three months.  As we know, Adobe's 
"upgrade" are close to the new software prices.

>From a normal user "dashboard" perspective there are more features and 
things just look a bit different.  Under the covers lots of things 
have changed.  Lots of things misbehave under the covers, resulting in 
system error log files of over 1MB in a single day.

It seems that quite a lot of source code from Sun's Solaris 10 has 
been used.  Apple does not really provide any system documentation and 
relies on independent web sites to provide the documentation.  I am a 
NFS user and noticed that Leopard has copied the Solaris automounter 
so I was able to re-use the automounter config files from my Solaris 
system.  Otherwise I would have felt pretty helpless.

The "Spotlight" feature takes many hours to run for the first time, 
and results in many reported crash logs while it is running.  After 
the system is installed, it is (apparently) not possible to 
successfully log out until after the Spotlight scan has completed. 
Spotlight seems to open each and every file so if you have a lot of 
files, it takes a long time.

No more Netinfo Manager or Netinfo configuration system.  No more 
xinetd.

I am still having problems with the hostname and DNS.  SSH refuses to 
reverse DNS lookups for some reason.

> That in my opinion is basic and does differentiate it from earlier versions 
> of Windows (I'm not up on the latest Windows releases though).

While I am not a fan of Windows, Windows has done quite well with 
allowing existing software to run (albeit, slower with each release) 
for the past 7 years, and without charging for an upgrade.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/